Preschoolers' causal learning from intentional actions--causal interventions--is subject to a self-agency bias. The authors propose that this bias is evidence-based, in other words, that it is responsive to causal uncertainty. In the current studies, two causes (one child controlled, one experimenter controlled) were associated with one or two…

Preschoolers use information from interventions, namely intentional actions, to make causal inferences. We asked whether children consider some interventions to be more informative than others based on two components of an actor's knowledge state: whether an actor "possesses" causal knowledge, and whether an actor is allowed to "use" their…

Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…